Tomb Maze: The Labyrinth Game I Always Wanted to Make
Some ideas wait a long time. For me, the labyrinth was one of them. Long before I made any of the games on this site, I wanted to make a maze game: corridors, wrong turns, the moment you realize you've been here before. It took me until now to actually build it: Tomb Maze, a horror maze game.
Why a labyrinth horror game
There's something about mazes that other game spaces don't have. A maze is honest. There's no trick to it; the way out exists, and you simply don't know where it is. Every corridor is a small decision, and every decision could be the wrong one. I've loved that feeling since I was a kid drawing mazes on paper for other people to solve.
When I finally sat down to make one, the question was what kind. A puzzle maze? A racing maze? The answer, after NEO, was obvious to me: a horror maze. Fear and getting lost belong together.
Tomb Maze: Horror Escape
You're inside a tomb. The way out exists. Something else is in there with you.
The tagline is three words: It hears you. That is the idea the whole game is built around. You want to hurry; hurrying makes noise. You want to stop and think; stopping lets whatever is in there close the distance. The maze itself is the puzzle, but sound is the danger, and the two push against each other the whole way out.
I'm not going to describe what's in there with you. Like NEO, this is a game that works best when you don't know.
What I learned from the others
Tomb Maze is the first game where I feel the earlier projects paid off directly.
From NEO, I learned how to build dread without showing much: pacing, silence, letting the player's imagination do the heavy lifting. From Bolt & Breath, I learned the hard way how to keep a dark scene readable on a phone, and how much performance a small device will forgive before it doesn't. A tomb needs to be dark but never unfair; you should always be able to tell a wall from an opening.
And from the maze obsession I've carried for years: the layout has to be learnable. A maze that is just random noise isn't scary, it's annoying. A maze you can slowly start to understand, where that understanding keeps getting interrupted by fear, is a different thing entirely.
The small hard parts
Making "it hears you" feel fair took the longest. If the thing in the tomb is too sensitive, every run ends in thirty seconds and nobody learns anything. If it's too forgiving, the threat is just decoration. I tuned it by playing, over and over, in the dark, mostly on weekends, until it felt tense but survivable.
The other hard part was the feeling of being lost without the frustration of being lost. That's a fine line. Small details that let you orient yourself, the way things change as you get closer to the exit, the rhythm of dead ends: these are what make a maze fair instead of cruel.
Where it is now
Tomb Maze: Horror Escape is out now on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, and it's free. Play it with headphones, in a quiet room, and tell me how far you got. I wrote a short launch note too: Tomb Maze is out.